She Regretted Nothing

Far more damning than what the East German novelist Christa Wolf did for the Stasi was her nostalgia for her totalitarian homeland. Michael Moynihan reviews "City of Angels."

By

Michael Moynihan

Updated Feb. 15, 2013 4:47 p.m. ET

When she died in 2011, East German writer Christa Wolf was eulogized, almost without exception, as a "dissident" writer whose novels were motivated by a hunger for truth. Once derided as the "state poet" of the German Democratic Republic, an undemocratic Soviet vassal state, Wolf had undergone a canonization in the last phase of her life. It was a judgment confirmed by her obituarists.

But Wolf, author of the celebrated novels "Divided Heaven," "The Quest for Christa T.," and...